Environmental Services Week: Celebrate This Member of Your Infection Control Team

We've all heard the expression, "It takes a village to raise a child." I bet you would agree it takes a "village' to keep your patients safe from infections - that village being the variety of professionals and support staff that you work with daily. We can easily appreciate the impact we have as nurses when we follow aseptic technique, safe injection practices and hand hygiene. It's also easy to understand the impact of the physician, the pharmacist, the respiratory therapist and other licensed members of the team.

But we sometimes ignore the impact on preventing infections that our co-workers in environmental services provide. We clearly want our exam rooms, waiting areas, ORs and patient rooms to appear clean but it's only recently that the impact of thorough cleaning has been linked to reduction in infections.

September 11-17 is Environmental Services Workers Week. Take the time this week to thank your building service colleagues for their part in keeping our patients safe. And remember to clean up after yourself especially with needles and other sharps. Sustaining a needle stick injury because of a nurse's carelessness is not what we'd want for the EVS team or ourselves.